Outage at primary data center (resolved)

Between 6:00 AM and 6:29 AM Pacific time August 7, 2011, all services were unavailable due to a power failure at our primary data center.

The problem was resolved for most servers by 6:29 AM, and for all servers except the “amy” server by 6:53 AM. The “amy” server needed extra manual intervention, and was working by 7:55 AM. All services are now operating normally.

Any e-mail that arrived during the outage was queued at our secondary data center and delivered as soon as the outage ended.

We sincerely apologize for this problem. We know you count on us for reliability, and we don’t consider this acceptable, especially since the data center has had previous power problems this year. However, this incident had a different root cause. It wasn’t a utility power failure that the redundant UPS systems didn’t handle, but was instead caused by a circuit breaker incorrectly “tripping” to prevent the power output of the UPS systems from reaching the server cabinets.

Update 4:15 PM: We have received an incident report from the data center indicating that they are working to replace the affected part of the UPS system to prevent further problems.

High load on some servers (resolved)

Three of our Web hosting servers (amy, flexo, and leela) experienced high load earlier today that caused some customers to see “503 errors” on their Web sites for a few minutes.

This was caused by an upgrade to the eAccelerator PHP caching system that removed all the cached files at once, which doesn’t normally happen.

The problem has been permanently resolved and will not recur.

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Brief scheduled maintenance on amy server (completed)

At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time tonight, January 16, the “amy” Web server will be restarted.

As a result, for customers on the “amy” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.

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Amy server temporarily unavailable (resolved)

Customers on the “amy” server experienced a nine minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 5:58 and 6:07 PM Pacific time today (November 16).

Customers on other servers were not affected.

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